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Summer’s End

By Judith Warner September 10, 2009 9:00 pmSeptember 10, 2009 9:00 pm

I am back, once again this week, to mortality, aging, time’s passage, loss. These preoccupations have, perhaps, always been with me in one form or another — the curse of a personality that always links happiness inextricably to loss — but they were given a new, particularly painful and acute edge earlier this summer when my friend Valérie, age 44, mother of two, suddenly died. And they became inescapable over the course of the past three weeks as we went on vacation to France, saw Valerie’s husband, Claude — suddenly gray and bearded, suddenly smoking — and reconnected to the part of ourselves that is rooted in that country, and that resolutely refuses to budge and come settle, with any sort of commitment, in our “real” life in Washington.

That part of ourselves is irrational. Some might say infantile, self-destructive. It refuses to let us sell the house in Normandy that is ruinous for us to keep, refuses to sever the ties that bind us to the grand oak tree out front and the plum tree behind, the lingering smell of wood smoke, and the kiddie slide and the Babar wading pool and the brightly colored plastic playhouse that neither of the girls can fit into anymore. It refuses to give up that house full of memories, prefers instead to rent it for free to the mice and spiders that take up residence in the long periods when we can’t afford to visit.

It’s a house that holds four people relatively comfortably, six if you push it and if they know each other well enough to share one bathroom. On our last weekend in France, we filled it — or the garden, at least — with 30 for lunch: Max’s childhood friends and their wives and children: 14 adults, 16 kids. They made a fire pit out in the yard and cooked meat, and they set the table and cleared the table and washed the dishes. (I protested loudly, even while counting my blessings.)

These friends of Max’s — and of mine — have been in his life since his early teen years and have become a kind of extended family for him. They became like family to me, very quickly, when I met Max in the late 1980s. They took me in and — rarest of things — they took me at face value. They really had no other choice, for I was unreadable, foreign. I fit none of their categories. I existed only in the present, my identity born of the moment they met me.

This was tremendously liberating, and also, at times, frustrating. Questions of identity are so important in your 20s. You work so hard to be taken seriously. To get other people to buy into the story you’ve convinced yourself will always be yours.

Now, in our 40s, all those struggles to become are, on the surface at least, over. Almost everyone has children now. The center of gravity has shifted; the children’s stories are ascendant; ours are merely background noise. At our daytime picnic, the conversation about kids was much the same as it might have been in Washington, only — perhaps because of the closeness, the length of the friendships, the single bathroom — more honest. One boy was more or less failing in school; his mother doesn’t know what to do with him. Another boy was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Another boy was on the brink, his mother feared, of a second bout of depression.
The women turned their lawn chairs into a tight circle. I talked about Valérie. Someone else knew of a woman who’d dropped her children off at school and then dropped dead in her elevator. Brain aneurism.

It happens, they said. Ça arrive.

What did we talk about when we were in our 20s? I can’t remember now.
I know that I hated expressions like ça arrive. And I know that we didn’t talk about death. We didn’t talk about our parents: my mother’s cancer scare or the death of a friend’s mother, who drowned in her car.

A father of one of Max’s friends was recently diagnosed with cancer. Terminal cancer. He doesn’t want to undergo treatment. He wants to shoot himself when the time comes. He has asked his son not to interfere but, please, to be the first to come and find his dead body.

I heard this story at a dinner, our first dinner all back together, in a restaurant in Paris.

Our friend drummed his hands on the table and looked around for the waitress.

“So,” he said, switching to English, “shall we change the subject?”

I used to feel that our life in France was as solid, as permanent and unchanging as our little house. Like our identities there, built in the moment, always in the present tense, it existed outside of time. That has changed. Nothing can be taken for granted anymore.

In July, after Valérie died, I wrote a column about my family’s emotional austerity. That was only a partial truth. An older generation — my mother’s relatives — her parents, uncles, the great-aunts with whom she shared a home for the early part of her life — weren’t austere at all. They were constantly in a state of high emotion. When I was a child and we visited them in Florida, there was always a scene at our departure. Torrents of tears; long, painful hugs; and — sometimes — acts of divine intervention. An aunt who’d spent the whole visit in a wheelchair might suddenly walk! Not an eye would be dry as we’d drive away, except for my mother’s, scanning the horizon for escape.

These things, it seems, can skip a generation.

I had to hide my face as we drove away from our last lunch with friends on Sunday. I felt ridiculous, old-ladyish. I was crying.

I just keep adding homes—like you, I can’t give up any either, not New York or Block Island or now the Ozarks. You can move from one to another to postpone the inevitable end of summer.//claudiassurfcity.blogspot.com

An excellent piece of writing that I relate to. My sister,a year
younger than me,died of colon cancer in March. Nothing feels right any more in that tried-and -true comfortable way. I am starting my 60’s now;time does trudge,then it skips,,on………

A “Dance to the Music of Time”, only in French. They do it differently, and how you approach events and situations seems to depend on which language you are speaking at the moment. I see this often: a French APEL meeting is not the same as the equivalent US PTA meeting: how you say something is more important than what you say, and in French one can talk endlessly with no data or substance transmitted. Our daughter, transferred to Paris after eight years in New York, married to a Frenchman, herself educated in lycées, is unwilling to accept a new assignment in NY, hesitant even to accept one in London. It would disrupt her way of thinking, talking, relating. Her vision for having a family.

“So shall we change the subject?” was so wise.
There is nothing more depressing than enduring a nice meal while the main subjects of conversation are suffering, surgeries and death. At one such event I heard from the far end of the table, :” She went to bed and never woke up.” Having heard just about enough I said, “What a way to go.” The intake of breath nearly cleared the room of oxygen. Many suffer, many have surgeries but EVERYBODY dies. Sorry about that, and the best way to go, is asleep in your own bed. Believe me, I know.

A very moving column, one of your best, even though I can already envision, unfortunately, the barrages of criticism unfurling…You bare your soul in a way that in our culture of supposed ‘openness’ breaks taboos. Not to mention the biggest taboo of all–death and dying.

I would strongly advise you not give up your house in Normandy! You have precious memories there–which even the mice are a part of!

Mahalo for your article Summers End. I’m happy to read your words describing in detail how things change as we get older. My wife and I are in our early 60’s. Like you things that are most important are our family and friends. We run a cancer retreat center in Hawaii. We see first hand how chronic illness affects us all and puts things into perspective. Life is forever precious and we savor each and every day.

Please keep up the good work. If you ever on the island of Hawaii (the Big Island) please stop by an be our guest.
Aloha and Peace

Judith-
I was thinking about how some say, “Fifty is the new thirty.” If so, that makes those of us in our forties in our twenties. It is a nice thought. However, as your post reminds us, our 40s are still a significant step forward in the inevitable march towards mortality.

However, it is our 40s, our time to do with as we choose. Your post forces us to zip up our jackets and stand in the cold light of truth of morality. At the same time, your post celebrates life, friendship, those we love and why it hurts so terribly much when they leave us. Yet I take from your post that how we choose to cherish the time with those we care about is a way to honor those who have left us.

Thank you for sharing this powerfully personal story that anyone born in the sixties can relate to, perhaps more than we want to admit.

I would usually commiserate when faced with a litany such as this but this piece, with its revelation of a second home in Normandy (even a small one), is off, in tone and intent. You misread the temperature of the times – some things are better not disclosed. You have spent enough time in France to have internalized that by now.

What a beautifully written and thought provoking article. But hold on just a moment Ms Warner. Your “real life” is the one that you choose. Choose the one that you live in France and that becomes your norm. Everything else becomes an aberration and a simple distraction. Trust me …. I know.

This is a lovely essay, Judith. Very honest, very raw. I, too, find myself growing more sentimental and nostalgic with age and refusing to let go of things that have themselves changed with time. I think loss of a loved one spurs us on in this process. I recently lost my father and just went back to Cape Cod for the first time in 20 years where I had nothing but memories of him, embedded in the sand and the sea and the waves. Thanks for this.

Do not stand at my grave and weep.
I am not there.
I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glints on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning s hush,
I am the swift uplifting rush,
of quiet birds in circling flight.
I am the soft star that shines at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry.
I am not there. I did not die.

It is the mid-40s. All of a sudden you look around, and you realize the people and places that are the backdrop of your life, are changing. They were changing before, too, but now it seems more earth-shattering because many of the changes are permanent, like the friend who drops dead in the elevator. When my father had hospice caregivers years ago, one declared that death, and life, is a process of letting go.

Sell the house before the mice and spiders claim it. It is OK to grieve for the loss of a friend, but turning it off when in France and turning it on when in Washington is the root of the conflict. You know that expression,” you can take the girl out of the country but you can’t take the country out of the girl.” The emotions you feel didn’t skip a generation, they just don’t exist in your circle of friends in France. And the tears you want to shed are better shed, despite your geographical position.

The late Mike Royko once wrote a similar column about how his Wisconsin vacation home became too painful to visit after his wife died, and how he regrettably sold it. When a person feels tied to a place, it’s hard to let both go.

When my mother, Esther died, I too could barely move a thing out of her apartment, on 63rd Street and Third Avenue, where she had lived for 65 years, and where my sister and I were born and raised. I wanted to keep it (a rental) and was willing to fight the landlords to do so. It was rent controlled.

Our kids “couldn’t be caught dead” living on the Upper East Side, trading our spacious pre-war for former cold water flats now charging ridiculous rent, but on the “happening” Lower East Side. So everything (including the 650 pound kitchen sink came with me. The owners were remodeling and didn’t want this old stuff.

Have hope. Now, just a few years later, and in my mid-60’s I am looking forward to give up a house we have lived in for 30 years: a home that now binds me, in a shackling way. I look forward to the freedom of fewer possessions.

As long as I can cook a meal for my family and friends, “home” is wherever I am abiding.

I can relate so viscerally to your discussion of how the center of gravity shifts, of the way the children ascend as we ebb into the background. There is sadness in this but also an inevitable rhythm that seems to make sense in a fundamental way.
What about those friends who have not yet had children, or made families? How do they fit in? I find myself feeling sad for them.
Thanks for another lovely, evocative piece.

In November, my best friend went to lunch with her son’s family. As they sat laughing at the baby’s antics, she looked off into the distance. Steve asked her what was wrong, but he got no answer. She had died that suddenly.

Amid my tears, I told my daughters to rejoice if I passed that quickly – right in the middle of a happy, active life. I do not want to sit along side an elevator door, begging crumbs of smiles from the visitors of others being warehoused to die.

This is a beautifully written piece. However instead of feeling sympathetic about this narrative of loss, I find myself sighing at such unselfconscious privilege. Oh the problems of the fortunate: lots of friends, travels to France, a house in France, pondering what your true identity is……
It is not that I do not understand and relate to the problems of the upper middle-class ( I have relatives who live in France and ponder the very same problem that you write about) but
I shudder at the lack of consciousness that your problems of loss and passage of time are colored by money, privilege, and education. Your blog ( which I enjoy) should address the issue or at least make a nod to acknowledge the reality of all the people who are barely making it, and to those who have lost their one and only house…..

In the last two years four people that were close to me died. The first three were friends in their 40’s – colon cancer. The last was my mother who died of cancer very suddenly. Its been a rough period of time for me emotionally. I have been trying to greet the new day with optimism but sometimes the sunset makes me sad. I want to live my life with fullness and joy – and I know the pain from this period of time will fade.